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Christina Ko

If you were to step into Hula’s expansive showroom in Quarry Bay’s Taikoo Place – the same complex that is home to many of the Hong Kong offices of luxury powerhouse LVMH – you wouldn’t imagine how the brand started out as a second-hand marketplace with a fitful online-only presence.
The gist of that warts-and-all description comes from Hula’s founder, Sarah Fung, remembering the struggles of running the company when it first launched in 2017.

The market for pre-owned wasn’t so much nascent as it was non-existent in Hong Kong, and though Fung and her friends had plenty of style to offload, the questions were where to sell and – most of all – who would buy it.
An early entrepreneur whose first post-uni gig was running her own lingerie brand in the UK, Fung was coming off a nine-year stint at luxury retailer Lane Crawford, through the heyday of fast fashion. “Suddenly it got on my nerves – the cycle of fashion,” she says. “I’d studied at Central St Martins and ran my own brand, so I always knew how to make things, and when you have the knowledge of where things come from, you respect them a bit more.”
There was the likes of Milan Station for well-kept bags and accessories, but for ready-to-wear there was a void, and one that few would dare broach, given the Chinese superstition that second-hand goods are considered unlucky. In the early days of Hula, Fung focused hard on shifting that mentality.
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“We thought, if you can get bad luck from wearing someone’s clothes, then surely you can get good luck. So we featured some influencers selling some of their wardrobe with the connotation of, actually you can get lucky, because when you buy pre-owned and you pick up that piece that fits you and was a really good price and no one else has it – don’t you feel lucky? That’s a really great feeling and you don’t get that so much when you go to a shopping mall.”
Turning around generations of negative associations was not a one-man or one-brand job and alongside that necessary recalibration was another: the need to counter the constant consumption that so irked Fung.
As fashion giants raced to ape mantras of sustainability, washing (and wishing) themselves green, Hula continued to quietly build an understanding of quality and value, never pointing fingers, offering a shopping experience that equals or exceeds that in a luxury boutique, and pushing an agenda of circular fashion using taglines like the one emblazoned on the showroom wall today: “I shop therefore I sell. I sell therefore I shop.”

Transitioning from a web-only presence to having showrooms – first in Wong Chuk Hang and Central, and now in Taikoo Place – changed the game for Hula, since customers were already requesting to come into the office to touch and try products. Items that weren’t moving online suddenly began to sell. Then Covid-19 came along and people had plenty of time to clean their wardrobes and think about the planet.
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“We doubled in size. I think people had time to reflect and slow down and educate themselves. When the pandemic hit, it dipped a little because people were nervous about germs, but then Swire [which owns Taikoo Place] wanted us in here. We did [a pop-up at] Rosewood last year that would never have happened five years ago.”
Today, as before, sellers are serviced through a concierge, who not only arranges item collection, but often organises cleaning or mending – with Hula usually bearing the cost – in the interest of extending the life of items.
“I’ve always come from a place where you mend or try to salvage things. Even now, we’ll find an item is stained, say that we’ll dry-clean it and take it off your bill, but do we ever take it off?” Fung laughs and shrugs, making it clear this business is customer first, profits second to her.
Fung is proud to note that while bags still bring in the highest revenue, in terms of quantity, it’s now clothing that sells the most. “We’ll talk about the quality of the Chanel jackets – the buttons – just to have people realise the amount of craftsmanship that has gone into these pieces; so they realise why, when something is too cheap. We educate about brands like Pleats Please Issey Miyake or Thierry Mugler. And when a designer leaves a brand, that’s great marketing too for us – like [former Celine creative director] Phoebe Philo.”
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By steering shoppers away from the high street, Hula liberates fashion lovers from the guilt of retail therapy. “To buy pre-owned and then resell it again and update your wardrobe and have that rotation is something that we want to try and promote. That way people can still have fun. And the products we’ve been getting are more high-end as we have matured; there’s more trust.”
“We do talk about sustainability, but it’s not the first and foremost thing, and though I think we should talk about it more, people are still interested in style. At first I was talking about sustainability, and nobody really got it.”
To that end, Hula has launched & Co, a rotation of new and sustainable brand pop-ups, tied in with chic community events that get bodies in the room. The showroom is even available for private rental for, say, hen parties, or wellness events, should the urge strike. The idea, ultimately, is to get people having fun with fashion.
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“Now we get people coming in and asking for vintage, which never happened. In fact, it was really hard for us to sell vintage here, nobody understood it. Now the Gen Zs are asking for that, because the whole thing now is about being unique. Non-conformity. And that trend has also made pre-owned a valuable asset because obviously you can really identify yourself.”
All of this is just icing on the cake for Fung. “When I started Hula I honestly did it because I don’t like waste. The second thing was sustainability, but this is so important to me now. I’ll get out of bed because there’s a cause, you know? That’s really useful for anyone starting a business to have a cause, because it’s good to know that you’re doing something that helps the planet.”
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After studying at Central St Martins, Fung had her own lingerie brand in the UK, then spent 9 years at luxury retailer Lane Crawford before getting irritated with the wastefulness of fashion
The preloved fashion boutique, which sells brands like Chanel, Mugler, Celine and Pleats Please Issey Miyake, did a pop-up at Rosewood, and has a showroom in Quarry Bay’s Taikoo Place


Disenchanted with all the waste in fashion, and spying a gap in the market, Fung started her online marketplace Hula, then later added physical showrooms
